Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times bigger than expected for our bodies. This is puzzling, as the brain is very costly – burning 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for only 4% of its mass.

As evolution tends to remove waste, how come we evolved such large, energy-consuming brains? There are many different ideas out there, with the dominant hypothesis suggesting that challenging social interactions were the driving force. But our new study, published today in Nature, finds evidence against this idea and shows that human brain expansion was likely driven by ecology.

The authors used a mathematical model as follows:

We found that a combination of ecological and social challenges do produce the brain size we see in humans. But surprisingly, it was ecological challenges that expanded brains. In contrast to the dominant view and our own expectation, we found that social challenges contributed by decreasing brain size. But you need both factors to get the brain size we see today – if there were no social challenges our brains would have been even larger but likely poorly suited to social life. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.

There are many reasons social challenges decrease brain size. One is that cooperating individuals can rely on each other’s brains. So individuals can avoid producing a very costly brain while still being able to solve the problems thanks to help from their buddies. More.

Then it gets fuzzy: Why did only humans develop comparatively large brains?

We found that ecological problems only lead to human-sized brains when individuals can keep learning hard skills as they grow. This can happen when individuals learn from allies their culturally accumulated knowledge, such as making fire. So our results and those of others suggest that a hard ecology and the accumulation of cultural knowledge could act in concert to produce a human sized brain.

But bees and ants have extensive cultural knowledge, yet manage with very little brain.

Mathematical models are probably the closest thing to literary fiction that science offers. Ferrero tells us, “[o]ur approach offers a new way to understand brain evolution using little more than some maths.” It is good that no more resources were wasted on a thesis so inconclusive. But never mind because…

… the topic has, of course, a history, as Forero notes. Here are a few other entries:

I’m an atheist with a PhD. in evolutionary theory. I spend much of my time encouraging a new relationship with religion and spirituality modeled on our relationship with fiction.

For example, I wish that Christians believed in Christ the way they believe in Santa Claus, as a fictional character based loosely on a historical one, reconfigured to embody a first-cut simplification of Christian values for kids that remains vivid and valued by nostalgic and conscientious adults.

Most of the world, for whatever reason, continues to distinguish between apparent truth and admitted fiction. Now, as to Sherman’s main point: He thinks that there isn’t yet a valid scientific explanation for agency

What do I mean by agency? Agency is the behavior of agents like you and me though not just of humans. Agency is evident in any living being, any organism making an effort for its own benefit, effort fitted to circumstances. You are an agent but so is a bug, begonia or bacterium. All organisms try to stay alive. Trying is the heart of agency.

So how does ID explain agency? Beautifully from a poetic fictional perspective. From a scientific perspective, they offer no explanation at all.

According to ID (and theology and spirituality in general) agency doesn’t need explaining because it’s the fundamental property of the universe, present in God before the origin of the physical universe. More.

Sherman does not source his claims about ID theory to anyone in particular and gives no sense of having read books by ID theorists (who don’t talk this way). By all means, read his column if you wish, but it says something about psychology today in general that – in Psychology Today – unsourced, poetically inspired opinion is welcomed in place of factual analysis and interviews with representative actual subjects.

See also: Psychologist offers a drive-by psychiatric diagnosis of ID guys. Those who cannot deal with a fact base often build an elaborate drama around why it doesn’t really exist or else doesn’t mean what it means, conscripting key players into unfamiliar roles and generalizing about the rest.

With individuals weighing in at more than 140 pounds, the critically endangered Chinese giant salamander is well known as the world’s largest amphibian. But researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 21 now find that those giant salamanders aren’t one species, but five, and possibly as many as eight. The bad news as highlighted by another report appearing in the same issue is that all of the salamanders — once thought to occur widely across China — now face the imminent threat of extinction in the wild, due in no small part to demand for the amphibians as luxury food.

…

“We were not surprised to discover more than one species, as an earlier study suggested, but the extent of diversity — perhaps up to eight species — uncovered by the analyses sat us back in our chairs,” says Jing Che from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “This was not expected.”

…

The researchers were surprised to learn just how much movement of salamanders has already occurred due to human intervention. Salamander farms have sought to “maximize variation” by exchanging salamanders from distant areas, without realizing they are in fact distinct species, Che explains. As a result, she says, wild populations may now be at risk of becoming locally maladapted due to hybridization across species boundaries.

One problem with speciation being such a conceptual mess and so poorly understood is, who knows if hybridization is a problem or a partial solution?

No question the poachers are doing great damage but how do we know that the hybridizers are? It would be good to bring the concept of speciation into the 21st century, bad news as that might be for schoolbook Darwinism.

When Stephen Hawking died on 14 March, the famed theoretical physicist had a few papers still in the works. Today, the Journal of High Energy Physics published his last work in cosmology—the science of how the universe sprang into being and evolved. (Other papers on black holes are still being prepared.) In the new paper, Hawking and Thomas Hertog, a theoretical physicist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU) in Belgium, attempt to stick a pin in a bizarre concept called eternal inflation, which implies—unavoidably, according to some physicists—that our universe is just one of infinitely many in a multiverse. Borrowing a concept from string theory, Hawking and Hertog argue that there is no eternal inflation and only one universe. But what they’re driving at is something even more basic: They’re claiming that our universe never had a singular moment of creation.

Most sources have focused on the “no Big Bang” aspect, probably because eternal inflation is Cool but the Big Bang is not. So this aspect of his theory is not so much discussed.

The problem with cosmic inflation:

At the most basic level, the existence of all these other universes wouldn’t affect our universe. They’re just too far away to have any connection with ours. On the other hand, the notion of eternal inflation and a multiverse may thwart cosmologists’ entire enterprise of explaining why the universe is the way it is, Hertog says. Things like the values of certain key physical constants could vary randomly among the pocket universes, he says, which would render moot any effort to explain why they have the values they do in our universe. They would be set by random chance, Hertog says, and that’s not very satisfying. More.

The jury is out on their solution, which gets rid of time as well as the Big Bang. Interesting to learn that there are other posthumous papers in the works.

The Daily Mail is right. The behavior is not unique to humans. Elephants do it too.

So, doubtless, do some other mammal species. As we have noted earlier, there is no tree of intelligence and suddenly discovering a behavior trait among chimpanzees that is supposedly “unique to people” is a good way of getting on the wrong track in understanding it.

It is, of course, refreshing to see epigenetics now making the mainstream publications. What has me in stitches, however, is all the things that are not said:

a) that Darwin hated Lamarck because it reintroduced teleology into evolution. Darwin’s whole purpose was to remove teleology and purpose from a discussion of life, thereby destroying theism. Now the reintroduction of epigenetics leaves the Darwinist program in tatters.

b) that the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 wasn’t just Germany blockading Holland, it was the Nazi party. That acme of Darwinian progress deliberately starved the Dutch as punishment, or perhaps simply for pleasure.

c) that the great Ukrainian famine of 1932 was artificial. Plenty of food in the fields, but the Communists forcibly took all the food precisely in order to starve the Ukrainian kulaks. Pure, unadulterated malice.

d) the great Chinese famine of 1958 was caused by Mao’s mistaken “Great Leap Forward” in which he forcibly combined the little rice paddies of individual farmers into giant cooperatives which proceeded to plow the clay-lined paddies with tractors, thereby destroying the water-retention properties necessary to grow rice. It is hard to know whether it was malice or incompetence, but seeing as it went on for 3 years, I would have to say Mao was imitating Stalin.

So not only did Darwin lose out to Lamarck, but it was discovered through the malice of his devotees.

Maybe it was malice. But the mass murderers cited above thought that their malice was science and that science included directed malice. That is precisely what made Darwinism in action so deadly, in terms of numbers killed during the twentieth century.

One can only get so far with malice based on a grievance (They done us wrong!) or religion (They’re unbelievers!). After a while, uninvolved parties don’t care much. But science makes universal claims, for good or ill. And with Darwinism well-entrenched among the Western urban elite, it is very difficult to even evaluate its science claims, let alone to have a serious discussion of its true outcomes.

Epigenetics shows the genome to be far too plastic to do what Darwinians have needed.

See also: Epigenetics: “[n]ew ideas closely related to Lamarck’s eighteenth-century views have become central to our understanding of genetics.” Epigenetics is another nail in the coffin of traditional Darwinism because the just-so stories of natural selection acting on random mutations depend, among other things, on the assumption that the inherited genome is a sort of lockbox with no influences other than its own random mutations. If the genome is as plastic as it now appears, many non-random factors influence it in predictable ways. The market for Darwinian just-so stories about how and why changes occur is likely to tank as the new approach sinks in.

One of the important drainage-collection pipes is installed near the top of the largest pair of cavities, the maxillary sinuses, located underneath the upper cheeks… Putting the drainage-collection point high within these sinuses is not a good idea because of this pesky thing called gravity.

Egnor replies:

Lents misunderstands the physiology of sinus drainage. The visible opening (ostium) in the maxillary sinus is not the only, or even the main, route of drainage. There is a complex system of interconnection, often at the microscopic level, between the paranasal sinuses, and Lents betrays an ignorance of sinus physiology in asserting that the large visible opening out of the sinus, which is indeed located at the upper wall of the sinus, is the primary physiological route of drainage.

…

In reality, the paranasal sinuses drain by very complex pathways, with many accessory ostia and via several (rather ingenious) interdependent pathways. Furthermore, they don’t drain primarily by “gravity,” as Lents naïvely asserts. Ciliary action moves secretions along to a network of drainage channels. It is perhaps best to think of the large ostium on the upper wall of the sinus as an “overflow” channel, analogous to the overflow opening in your sink. It is not meant to conduct the main flow of fluid in the sinus. In fact, it can’t be the main outflow path, because it is high in the sinus yet the sinus is not often filled with fluid.

From design considerations, it can be inferred that a drainage ostium in the floor of the sinus would drain at too high a rate, drying out the sinus mucosa and predisposing to plugging of the ostium by thick debris. More.

“Bad design” is, in general, a poor argument against design. A design in nature weighs alternative constraints for a transient life form in a specific, limited environment. It does not weigh an existing design against a Platonic ideal. Life forms in nature are almost always optimally designed but never ideally so. They also feature built-in obsolescence and ecology-friendly weaknesses that limit their population growth.

Anyone who designs neighbourhoods, school lunch programs, or traffic routes will be aware of the challenge of optimization. But the concept remains forever a mystery to some.

External testicles another instance of bad design? Oddly, in making such a dramatic claim (“there is no good reason that sperm development has to work best at lower temperatures”), Lents does not quote any expert on the subject of temperature and sperm development.

In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions—to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention—which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes a formal language in which to make this kind of thinking possible—a 21st-century version of the Bayesian framework that allowed machines to think probabilistically.

Pearl expects that causal reasoning could provide machines with human-level intelligence. They’d be able to communicate with humans more effectively and even, he explains, achieve status as moral entities with a capacity for free will—and for evil.

Pearl is recognized as developing a method that enables machines to make probabilistic calculations but feels that the field is in a rut just now. He hopes to enable machines to have a model of reality and is quite convinced that they will have free will and the ability to do evil. He proposes that we will know that a robot has chosen evil when

it appears that the robot follows the advice of some software components and not others, when the robot ignores the advice of other components that are maintaining norms of behavior that have been programmed into them or are expected to be there on the basis of past learning. And the robot stops following them. More.

This is heady talk for a field that Pearl thinks is in a rut now. Is it a rut or a gulf?